Looks like your guy over here is gonna build a bear blog with the monospace web theme[1] now
I have several accounts on mataroa and one of my posts on it somehow even got indexed which I needed to pull as it was relevant in some discord discussion and I just searched it on duckduckgo and I was so proud of it lol.
I might try bear blog as well! I also really like the upvote feature at the bottom, that plus HN could be some great way to have both comments and a basic feedback without let's say setting up a blog myself although that could be a good learning experience as well but let's just say not right now :)
* The ability to save comments, as well as posts
* Ideally a separate 'favorites' and 'read later' category
* Some kind of [tags] on posts, ideally something individuals can contribute to. It would be easy to add from an existing set of tags, adding a unique new tag would be harder and require maybe an older account or more 'points' or whatever.
* Maybe some kind of 'bump' system when linking to things that have already been posted? It feels a bit silly for there to be like 10 duplicates of a post from different time periods. But maybe that's better than the alternative, not sure.
You can view your favourited comments from your profile page.
Good to know though, thank you!
Click on a comment’s timestamp and then 'favorite' at the top.
I kind of enjoy it. Some posts have become like a yearly/bi-yearly occurrence, and if I enjoyed the discussions the previous times, I'll most likely enjoy the discussions this time too.
As long as it's not the same stuff every day, I'm fine with things being re-posted once a year or so, long enough for me to forget I read the previous one.
Unfortunately sometimes I'd choose to sort by "drama", and get my rant on about the latest Ruby shitfight, or whatever Matt/Automattic or Elon/Grok/X are doing. And me giving in to that temptation would probably make the site objectivity worse, so perhaps it's better the way it is?
The first part is correct, the second part is correct in theory, but any place that has "upvotes" (like HN or reddit) ends up with the community putting straight up incorrect stuff as the "top comment".
So while "far up in the comment thread" can signal quality, accuracy and truth, you'd be mistaken to automatically assume so. HN is, after all, just another community on the website filled with humans who can be wrong.
There is no shortage of comments and posts heavily critical of people associated with YC, though. Search comments for 'Gary Tan' and you'll see what I mean.
Why do you think they're not at least tied to help eachother?
The board of Ycombinator may not be here moderating but do you think they're independent?
Well yes. They have 2 brilliant guys running an incredibly popular site with a business model of replacing recruiters for their companies, most of which are of interest to an average HN reader.
Let's be conservative and imagine that YC gets them both for a fully loaded total of only half a million per year. (Could be half that, could easily be twice that.) These two run the site and moderate it both. That's already damn impressive. Let's imagine hosting costs YC nothing, somehow. (Apparently it's only run on one machine.)
For the low low price of free you and I are getting a high performance site with astonishingly good moderation and relatively few ads, certainly none that beg for an ad blocker. Of course I expect it to comply with YC's needs but in fact there's an immense amount of criticism of YN and its cohorts.
Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum (I say that as a person with politics that probably run afoul of most HN readers).
Even with your tinfoil hat on I'm pretty sure you'll find nothing else remotely close to this good on the web for free.
Well that's not the reality thankfully.
> Now tell me where there's another site with quality this high that's free and keeps its prejudices to a minimum
I agree with you, but I'm biased towards this type of community where there is a real discussion, I've been proven wrong many times here and it never felt personal.
I only put my tinfoil hat o because when something is free these days, it's usually you as the product. I'd never want to lose the community but back in my day there was IRC servers with packed channels, there was Usenet. These days it's a rarity instead of the norm. Maybe I'm just getting too old.
Sometimes, but that's not the case. I think most Open source is an example of that.
There are also many mastodon /lemmy / matrix instances and so many other niche things which run on donations and I guess some of them don't mind chipping in some of their money for the idea of a better internet if that interests them as well.
Sorry if it got off topic but just because something is free doesn't mean you are the product, you can be usually right, but I don't think HN is nearly close to this (it depends) and I feel so thankful to such products/services for existing in a world of making me the product. I just want to say thanks to those services where its free and you aren't the product and they run on donations, we people really need to chip in more in those donations as well for a better more decentralized internet
All these problems are writ much larger now because the net is like a million times as popular as back then. No social media site can survive on free moderators and without membership fees unless the rent gets paid somehow.
I assert HN requires less "rent" from us users than any other equally successful social media site.
Stories can be popular because people agree with an agenda the story espouses/supports/furthers without the story being intellectually interesting in and of itself, deviating from well known presumptions or shedding new light. And even an intellectually interesting story can create more heat than light in the comments.
Everyone loves a dumpster fire a little bit now and there but unfortunately the internet standard is a tire fire.
Emojis, Images and GIF posts, Profile Pictures, Followers/Following, Sponsored posts
…if you wanted to destroy hackernews
Eh. It’s garbage in, garbage out, mostly like any other platform. It’s still easy to degrade the site if the users are determined enough.
How you choose to use it dictates your takeaway more than most social media platforms I suppose, which is actually the best thing about it IMO. That much is worth contrasting with the other options out there, no question.
This describes Wikipedia more than HN.
I am not a weightlifter, but I'd occasionally visit that sub just because of how welcoming and supportive it was.
HN actually is a social network.
You upvote stories on Hacker News and Reddit, as opposed to following people
Like, its not following exactly per se but it was a discussion outside of the post itself which was about python. And it was great.
I feel like this could be an example for the parent comment as well as how I personally feel like HN is more social networky than say wikipedia but not at twitter or trad social media level I guess.
Maybe we should all stop trying to narrowly class what's allowed to be a social network?
"Earlier" could be anything from Usenet to forums etc that were based around topics. Your view of content was based around the topics you selected. You followed topics.
A social network was where you connected with other people, and your view of content was based around who those people were and their activity. You followed people not topics.
That's definition I'm sticking to, and why I don't regard reddit or HN as a social network. Although on HN doesn't really have topic following functionality, you just select topics on the fly.
https://www.esafety.gov.au/about-us/industry-regulation/soci...
"Services including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X and YouTube meet many of the conditions the legislation uses to define an ‘age-restricted social media platform’.
[snip...blah blah]
Over the coming weeks, eSafety will have more to say about the platforms it considers must comply with the minimum age obligations."
So they are going to start with the big obvious ones and then keep trying to follow the trail of where teens flee to online.
'Tis a silly thing.
For me, a touch more Markdown like for text links [text](url) would be nice, not asking for image support or anything like that, though. As cool as the [0] is, the <a href=> tag and its predecessors were invented early on for a reason.
At the moment the only way this type of discussion really works is that people post on their own sites and we sometimes see that more detailed response. The risk of images descending into meme exchanges I think is quite low given the participants. Not sure to the extent more formatting would be good but I can definitely see its value and I use it on Reddit sometimes.
[0] or whatever the recommended alternative is nowadays
Boy what incredibly different universes we live in.
If anyone already has the infrastructure set up for this already, I really, really, wish for something where the top X HN stories can be input to AI sentiment analysis and graphs automatically created which shows, per time period, the % of submissions it classifies as "political" and the % classified as "mainstream news".
In the top 100 posts on any given day it has to be a significant percentage. I flag all political posts I see and I'm constantly flagging. The AI analysis wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least be fairly impartial, and automated. Why not collect the data?
I think your ability to flag should be immediately taken away for this reason.
Some users are granted 'instant' [flag] -> [dead] privileges (if they consistently only flag obvious spam), their work is looked at, if they start showing a bias that ability is degraded.
Part of the moderation task at HN is weighting user feedback by looking at individual behaviour.
Two changes to flagging would really improve it, and cause it to not be used casually as a mega-downvote: 1. Flag-powered users should only get like 1-2 flags a week. 2. Flagging should be attributable back to the user who flagged it. If you feel you're doing the site a good service by flagging trash articles, then you should have no problem with publicly linking your name to the flagging action.
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon… If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
I flag most politics, too (not the legitimately interesting think pieces… I’m talking about the day-to-day DC noise).
I don’t want this place to turn into the front page of Reddit or Facebook - outrage bait news stories and sensational half-truth political headlines to generate engagement. This is a unique space, as the article mentions, and I think it’s so interesting to engage with people here. I want to hang onto that.
Over time, if we’re not careful, this could end up being overrun by: “You won’t believe what Chuck Schumer Tweeted about TRUMP’s latest executive order!!”
I said there are some stories I don’t flag.
You seem to be new here, but this is easily misinterpreted by regulars as well: what you are referring to are not rules, they are guidelines. It says so "plainly": https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is an important distinction especially for the bit you quoted, because what is old and uninteresting to some is new and interesting to others. This subjectivity is why it is not necessarily in the community's best interest to flag politics stories; when you do it, you're acting based on your own preferences, and you're robbing others of an opportunity to learn something new.
Not surprisingly, various groups often grant those with greater tenure and more connection leniency. I just despise the lies.
There was a discussion here where a professor with a specialty on the underlying subject was 'corrected'/crowded out by very detailed comments that sounded cogent, had buzzwords in them but ultimately were incorrect.
Seeing that makes me wonder about the discussion here on topics I know nothing about. Vetted flair for subject matter expertise for users would help. I'm still interested in what a chip designer has to say about astronomy but it would make it easier to weigh the contribution.
Remember, HN isn't exactly checking anyone's CV at the door. All it takes to post here is knowing how to fill out a web form. The culture here tends to believe the simplistic design somehow draws deep technical intellects like moths to a flame but it really doesn't.
I guess it's better to view HN as entertainment than expertise overall.
Three thoughts...
1. I really enjoy seeing what the extremely technically accomplished users think about non-technical topics.
2. I like that only my accumulated knowledge of their usernames allows me to easily connect the dots for thought #1.
3. It is fun when you come to appreciate someone's thinking on many non-technical topics then later, on a technical thread, realize that user is the person behind $SOMETHING_BIG. But that fun relies on accumulating #2.
No, they don't.
This is a link aggregator. By definition stories posted here have already been posted (and broken) elsewhere.
I miss the old HN,
the bold HN,
straight from the code HN,
real founder soul HN.
I hate the new HN,
the crew HN,
the think alike echo HN,
only talk about LLMs HN.1. nested/indented comments are confusing. Perhaps it's connected to how I don't like programming languages that rely on indents for defining blocks of script instead of curly brackets, but I think that the reasons are unrelated. When you have a large tree of comments, it's simply hard to keep track which comment replies to which. It's easy when you have a couple comments, but I simply can't process a large tree of, say, 20 comments, I'll forget the context of the parent by the time I read the 5th one. Also sometimes it's hard to recognize if the next comment is indented 1 or 2 times to the left. I don't know why is this design so popular, someone even wrote a frontpage for 4chan that displayed its posts in this manner. I'd love to have a frontpage for hackernews that displayed its posts like on an imageboard! if you know such, please let me know. At least HN provides the next/prev/parent buttons, but they lack the onhover rendering of the post like on 4chan. These buttons also don't exist on hckrnws.com frontend which I tend to use, but it's a minor nitpick.
2. upvotes. I really like the 4chan way of bumping and making comments with a lot of replies the ones that stand out instead of those that a lot of people agree with. I think it encourages more diverse opinions. But on the other hand, perhaps the upvote system is somehow key to the pretty high level of discussion on HN, can't really tell.
Chan-style upvotes are never going to happen, though. Hacker News' entire thing is aggressive moderation and curation, and high signal-to-noise ratio, even at the cost of freedom of speech and diversity of opinion. Popularity is not a filter for intellectual quality, often it's the opposite, which is why high velocity threads tend to just set off the flamewar detector.
Of course, karma isn't much of a filter for intellectual quality either but what are you going to do?
Looking forward to The Bad Parts.
(In my experience, the ones dunking on it are the ones spending most time on it…)
The system rewards intellectual curiosity until you direct it at HN itself. If you start asking questions about how moderation works or challenge the culture here, you'll find that dissent gets quietly penalized, and transparency only goes so far.
The other issue with HN is they seem to decide how you curate your own inputs into the site. Even deleting your own comments is not allowed after a time limit. I don't understand what benefit this brings, and it's certainly not communicated in the HN guidelines.
If a platform claims to foster intellectual curiosity, it should be able to tolerate that curiosity being directed at its own moderation choices. Otherwise, it's just managing its image, not building trust.
Consider making article submissions.
- the flag button needs a confirmation modal. It's way too easy to hit it by mistake when trying to hide a story.
- Support for autoformatting markdown style tables. I'm not asking for full markdown since I know people would just abuse headings, etc.
But holy* I have so may flagged posts that the list doesn't fit on one page. The latest one is from 2024/03 and oldest one is from 2020/06 (maybe that's when I started owning an iPhone, but not sure). And I don't see any reason why I'd flag any of those submissions.
I think it's very likely that the order of the text/link below the story title (on the frontpage) is to blame. For example:
> nn points by xxxxx n hours ago | flag | hide | nnn comments
The fact that links 'n hours ago' and 'flag' are right next to each other makes it very easy to click on the 'flag' accidentally.
So a +1 from me to do something to fix this problem.
That said, it's possible this is all accounted for in the system. Maybe the mods only get notified above some threshold and that threshold has been tuned to ignore the background noise of accidental flags. Adding a confirmation would lower the noise level, but perhaps not translate into any real benefit.
The experience is more like "I clicked on a link to an article, but instead of loading the article, the HN page just reloaded. Now I have to scroll down to find it again... Hmm.. Where is it? Maybe it's moved to a different page...? What was I even looking for again? Oh well"
While we're at it - I also would favor a strict subset of markdown, but it would be really nice to have a strict subset of markdown instead of the homebrew thing we have now. The biggest one that regularly catches people out is that
* foo
* bar
* foo * bar
instead of a bullet-point list. And on that note, I'd really like ``` to do code blocks instead of needing 2+ space indentation as the way to make a code block.
The other thing I appreciate about HN is it helps me practice writing.
Once graduating from University, there aren’t many built in ways to get regular writing practice and HN comments are it for me.
Also, I haven't really started a blog, or atleast I haven't stick to one (I make multiple mataroa accounts etc.) but its just that HN comments feel easier to me to type into and they are also generally more preferable to me atleast right now.
I’ve learned a lot from watching constructive disagreements between other people. Regardless of whether they’re “right” or not, healthy disagreements sharpen our perspectives.
Only true if your general argument is still in line with the HN zeitgeist. You are allowed to disagree so long as you dont disagree on core topics. HN has the same problem reddit does in that a voting system in general necessarily introduces censorship and lack of diversity of discussion. While people here don't karma farm (or karma guard) as aggressively it takes almost nothing to end up shadowbanned/instant-flagged/etc for having a disagreeable standpoint.
In other words, as long as you aren't right of center you can disagree all you want. Even a trivially libertarian viewpoint is met with significant ire.
Voting systems in general are a massive problem in social media. They don't stop the truly bad actors but they drive away the exact thing that prevents you from being caught in an echo chamber (of which HN is an example of).
The line is closer than you think. Cross it and your words just disappear.
I particularly dislike it when comment sections erupt into downvote wars on anything that varies from the prevailing opinion in the room, irrespective of whether it makes a logical argument or contributes information or insight to the conversation.
What happened to humility?
Downsides of HN:
- Very limited subject matter
- Very limited pool of subject matter experts
- Lack of corrective mechanism when it comes to bad information and disinformation. Fallacious thinking and conclusions spread and remain because of the aforementioned lack of experts
- Signalling, in groups, and guidelines enforced on whim
- Extreme groupthink at times
I want my SNR on these kinds of sites to work like an op amp, not like a transistor whose control circuitry is soldered on so badly it only makes a connection every so often and is floating for most of the time.
Reddit gets talked down all the time but it has far more SMEs across far more subjects that to me, as a hacker and tinkerer and doer, I just find far more useful and informational. Often times I’m in dialogue with founders and makers of the thing I’m asking about. That’s just a fact, it can’t be disagreed with because Reddit is defacto way more diverse and has a far, far larger member base. Even if there are more loud miscreants, there are also way more knowledgeable people than HN attracts. And they give AMAs.
The only good part of HN to me is the simplicity of the layout to get to the news that I care about. But the actual commentary is most often noise and conjecture. Again, someone with hands on knowledge weighting in is a rarity. So I mostly look for articles I’m interested in.
When I want to learn something new and I’m looking for advice and a starting point, I turn to Reddit sometimes. But never to HN.
I’ve been reading HN since 2010 or so. HN has lost a lot of good posters over the years due to a combination of subject matter and the discourse of people here. Some publicly announced their departures, others just left. You can find blog posts of such that are never even posted on here (but why would they be).
Of course I understand that max upvotes is not the be all and end all, but when there are a dozen interesting posts a day, each with 300+ comments that I want to parse, I need a way to still have some life, so a way to get the net reader take on the top few comments would be a nice filter.
I used to be like this, but I got over it. I'm much happier now I stopped putting spaces around my em dashes.
...but if I did, it would be to wish for a tip jar or some way to give back to the unflappable mods.
The New Yorker called it Performative Erudition: frequently, people here are entirely focused on appearing to have insight, appearing smart and avoiding colloquial language to the point where having a straightforward normal conversation is sometimes impossible. To say that the userbase has a "mindset of humility" is almost too ironic for words.
And yet.
HNers are still often guilty of Performative Erudition. It's not _just_ the use of technical jargon.
HN as a commenting community is markedly more hit-and-miss. We often comment without reading the articles, we are sometimes gratuitously negative for the sake of negativity, and there isn't any other place where I've seen so many people being confidently wrong about my areas of expertise. I think we'd be better off if we were more willing to say "this is okay and I don't need to have a strong opinion about it" or "I'm probably not an expert on X, even though I happen to be good with programming".
pedalpete•7h ago
dingnuts•6h ago
tech234a•6h ago
pedalpete•5h ago
But I wasn't saying it was "turning into reddit", just saying how to explain it to an outsider.
fishmicrowaver•6h ago